Ensure your company takes the clever option
By Gordon Smith
Like the old joke about eating an elephant one piece at a time, a business intelligence project can be broken down into five phases. That way, what could have been a mammoth task shouldn’t force a company to bite off more than it can chew.
“The first phase, in its simplest form, is about making available previously unavailable information for the business,” said Ronan Stafford, chief executive of Codec Systems.
The second stage involves putting that data in a wider context with relevant reports. The third incorporates the financial side of the business and includes budgeting. The fourth stage is advanced strategic management.
“Business intelligence will help you set the strategy, test it and drive the business in the direction it wants to go,” said Stafford. The final part of the journey leads to full Business Intelligence (BI) that covers the entire organisation.
Many businesses encounter one of two challenges along their BI journey. Most don’t have the data that answers those questions in the first place.
In addition, some organisations have implemented ERP software which are transaction processing systems. As such, they’re not designed to answer questions or allow users to jump easily from one year’s figures to the next.
BI has the capacity to join the dots of data that may be scattered across many different systems in the business. Without it, numbers can often be of limited value.
What good is it to know that the company sold 1,000 units of a particular product in its last financial year? By itself, that’s no indication of good or bad performance. As questions occur, the role of a BI tool is to answer them.
That data then becomes relevant when it’s seen in a wider context, compared with how many were sold the previous year, or by how much the overall market for that product grew or declined. “BI is about the right information, in the correct context, delivered at the right time to the right person in away that allows them to ask other questions,” said Stafford.
“The way to implement a BI project is to have a quick win, with tangible measurable value to the business, so the company can see that BI adds value,” he said. “Then you can get a sponsor behind the project, because after that it does take time to implement an end-to-end performance management system.”
To achieve the quick win, Stafford advised companies to choose a supplier that had implemented a business intelligence system in another organisation in the same sector.
Although project times may have shortened, organisations shouldn’t underestimate the work involved and the impact it will have. “It’s not just a technical or implementation challenge. It requires a behavioural or cultural change in an organisation, and that takes time,” Stafford said.
The decision-making process is likely to alter rapidly if management suddenly have timely information on which to base their decisions.
Evaluating potential BI providers should go beyond just testing the tools they offer. “You need to consider not just the product, but the implementation team, support team, maintenance team, training team and business advisory team,” said Stafford. “In BI, you don’t buy products, you buy solutions.”
